Theodosius Dobzhansky — biology (genetics) with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born in January 1900 at Nemirov, a small town some two hundred kilometres south-east of Kyiv, the only child of a mathematics teacher and his wife. The unusual first name came from a local saint to whom his parents had prayed for a child. He spent a childhood pinning beetles and butterflies and cataloguing the small differences between them, which turned out to be the question he worked on for the next seventy-five years.
He read biology at the University of Kiev from 1917 to 1921 and stayed on to teach, first at the Polytechnic Institute and then at the university. In 1924 he moved to Leningrad as assistant to Yuri Filipchenko, who headed the new department of genetics and had set up a Drosophila laboratory there on the model of Thomas Hunt Morgan's work in New York. That August he married Natalia Sivertzev, a geneticist working with Ivan Schmalhausen in Kyiv.
In 1927 he was awarded a fellowship by the International Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. He and Natalia left the Soviet Union on 4 December and reached New York on 27 December, and he walked into the fly room at Columbia - Morgan's group, with Sturtevant, Bridges and Muller in it, the laboratory that had established that genes sit on chromosomes and can be mapped.
He followed Morgan to the California Institute of Technology in 1928, was made assistant professor of genetics in 1929 and professor in 1936, and decided to stay. He became an American citizen in 1937. The timing mattered: Soviet genetics was already coming under political pressure, and within a decade the discipline he had trained in would be dismantled, with Filipchenko dead and his successors removed.
His contribution was to take fruit flies out of the laboratory and into the field, and then to explain what the mathematicians had been saying. Population geneticists had worked out the mathematics of selection in the 1920s and 30s, but few working biologists could follow it. Genetics and the Origin of Species, published in 1937, restated it in terms biologists could use and showed with real populations how mutation and chromosomal variation generate the diversity that selection acts on. It is generally identified as the book that began the modern evolutionary synthesis, and its successive editions functioned for decades as the standard text of evolutionary biology.
He returned to Columbia as professor of zoology from 1940 to 1962, then to the Rockefeller Institute, and after retiring moved in 1971 to the University of California at Davis, where he worked until his death. Richard Lewontin was among his doctoral students. He received the National Medal of Science in 1964 and the Franklin Medal in 1973.
A practising Orthodox Christian, he saw no conflict between evolution and religious belief and wrote on the subject repeatedly. The title of his 1973 essay - nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution - has outlived most of the arguments it was written for. He died at Davis in December 1975. His daughter Sophie married the Yale anthropologist Michael Coe.
"Left the USSR in December 1927 on a Rockefeller fellowship; US citizen 1937"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Nemyriv (Ukr)
He left the Soviet Union on 4 December 1927 on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and reached New York three weeks later, choosing to remain. The Soviet genetics in which he had trained was dismantled within the following decade.
Born Theodosius Grigorievich Dobzhansky at Nemirov in the Russian Empire, now Nemyriv in Ukraine, the only child of a mathematics teacher. Educated at the University of Kiev, then at Leningrad under Yuri Filipchenko in the first Soviet Drosophila laboratory.
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Nemyriv (Ukr). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."